The Books: “Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best” (Nancy Nelson)

518DRVBN0NL._SL500_AA240_.jpgDaily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best, by Nancy Nelson

I can imagine that this is pretty much a book only for hardcore fans. It’s almost an oral history, the biographical details are slim – everything is swayed in favor of the adulation of Cary Grant (the foreword of the book is by his last wife Barbara and his daughter Jennifer) … but what is so terrific about it is that there are first-hand anecdotes about the filming of all of his movies – from his co-stars, his directors, his friends … stuff that may seem trivial and might not make it into a “serious” biography, but THIS is the stuff I want to hear: what was it like on the set of Notorious? How did Cary Grant work on his part in Suspicion? What did Mae West have to say about him? There are funny stories about improvisational moments, and mistakes that turned into gold … all of the stories of what it was like to be Cary Grant, as an actor. I loved this book. I still dip into it from time to time, when I want to write about Grant and one of his movies – because there’s not a movie here that is not covered in detail, and I love it because the narrative voice of Nancy Nelson is completely unobtrusive. She basically gives bullet points to set up the anecdote (“On April 9, 1964, Grant started working on Father Goose“) – and then she lets the voices take over. She lets Leslie Caron speak, or Cary Grant, or Cy Coleman … lengthy first-person monologues … I just love that crap.

Grant fans, you don’t want to miss this book. It may not be “serious” but it is my favorite of all of my Grant books. It’s the one I “use” the most, in my writing.

To me, it gives the most complete picture of the mystery that is Cary Grant – and that is because it doesn’t try to pin down the mystery, it doesn’t try to ‘explain’ Grant … It just lets the movies speak for themselves, and also his behavior on the set – toward his co-stars, directors, leading ladies … The man begins to emerge. Sort of. It still doesn’t “explain” him, and I actually prefer that. Books that are hellbent on explaining him (“He was gay and THAT’S why he became Cary Grant!”) are annoying (although sometimes interesting) – because they cannot handle the mystery, they must decide on a THEORY and then back that up … I am not interested, for the most part, in that kind of thinking. Especially not when it comes to human beings. Based on the known facts, it seems that Grant probably was at least bisexual, who knows, I don’t really care – Or I care inasmuch as it affects his work. That’s what interests me. I’m also, though, suspicious of those who seem adamant that Cary Grant was straight as a board … I’m talking mainly about fanboys/girls, naturally. You know, the types of fans who will go to the MAT that Clay Aiken is not only straight, but a gift directly from the Lord to help the downtrodden people, and he’s a good boy, he’s good to his mother, he just hasn’t found the right girl yet! Claymates, I believe they call themselves. They are FEROCIOUS at any suggestion that their beloved Clay is Gay. It’s odd. (Especially because … hmmm .. I’m thinkin’ the Claymates are headed for a pretty awful revelation one of these days and their entire worldview will come crushing down.) But there’s a similar faction in Grant fan-land, because of the rumors that he was gay, had a long relationship with Randolph Scott, even some of the comments he made himself in his life … I don’t know, there are the fans who will get ENRAGED that you suggest their beloved idol was, perhaps, gay. I don’t get it. What do you care if he was gay, straight, bi, whatevs? Isn’t he still Cary Grant? Why are you so invested in him NOT being gay? I get annoyed at the Team America “everyone is gay gay gay” theme (Allison was laughing recently reading a bio about Hepburn, and she got annoyed at the author’s insistence that everyone was gay – she found herself rolling her eyes at it) … but I am also curious at those who seem vehement against it. I don’t know. I don’t know Cary Grant. I have my theories like everyone else (the man was bi), but that has nothing to do with who he is as an ACTOR. (Or, perhaps it does have something to do with it … perhaps that “mystery” I keep referring to is part and parcel of Cary Grant keeping aspects of himself separated off … something he did repeatedly, throughout his life. Nobody knew all of him.) Whatever, none of this is here, there, anywhere. If Grant was bisexual, it still doesn’t explain the magic of his appeal on screen, and the continuous awe he inspires, as an actor. He was a top box office star for, what, 3 decades? Unheard of. And I believe it would have continued, if he hadn’t retired. Cary Grant was never going to be an old guy with 2 lines in a movie. Sean Connery is similar. There’s something still so vital about the man, he’s still a valid leading man … you don’t want to see Connery in the background, or in a bit part … it just wouldn’t seem right. Grant decided to step down. And he seemed to do so with zero bitterness. He just amazes me. There’s nothing about him that is even remotely like anyone else.

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I decided to choose an excerpt from the book that had to do with the filming of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby.

EXCERPT FROM Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best, by Nancy Nelson

In February 1938 Bringing Up Baby was released. The first of four films Grant made with director Howard Hawks, it has become one of the classics of screwball comedy. His costar for the second time was Hepburn, and the two now were working as a well-practiced team.

Both Grant and KATHARINE HEPBURN were meticulous about details. She recalls: “We wanted it to be as good as it could possibly be. Nothing was ever too much trouble. And we were both very early on the set. Howard Hawks was always late, so Cary and I worked out an awful lot of stuff together. We’d make up things to do on the screen – how to work out those laughs in Bringing Up Baby. That was all Cary and me.”

CG: Kate’s a joy. At the end of Bringing Up Baby she climbs up high on a ladder next to the brontosaurus, to apologize for what has happened. The ladder falls, and she climbs to the back of the brontosaurus, where I’m standing on a platform. She had to get over the brontosaurus. As she moves, the brontosaurus starts to collapse. I told her when and how to let go. I told her to aim for my wrists, an old circus trick. You can’t let go of that kind of grip, whereas if you go for the hands, you’ll slip. She went right for my wrists, and I pulled her up. Kate was marvelously trusting if she thought you knew what you were doing.

Brontosaurs were one thing, but HEPBURN knows that Grant never warmed up to the leopard in Bringing Up Baby: “He didn’t like cats, so he would have none of it. I was the only one who would work with the leopard because Cary was so scared of it. I was too dumb to be afraid. They blocked the scene and caged in the leopard. Olga Celeste, the trainer, was hidden off camera – with a whip. I had three scenes to do with the leopard. The first was a walk-through. In the second I’m in a negligee with the leopard trailing after me. And in the third I’m in a short dress with weights on the bottom, so when I turned, the skirt flicked. And by jiminy, when I turned – and I was much too sure of myself – the skirt flicked. The leopard sprang at my back. I didn’t see it. That was the end of shooting the leopard with an actor.

“During the filming we dropped a fake leopard through the top of Cary’s dressing room. He was furious at us – but amiable, of course.”

(Decades later Grant had noticeably overcome his fear of cats. ROY, of Siegfried and Roy, relates that “Cary and Barbara came to our home in Las Vegas, where we have about twenty animals – leopards, tigers, great Danes – living freely. Cary would sit with us in the garden room, with a tiger sitting at his feet and watch the others swimming in the pool. He was fascinated with our commitment to preserving the white tiger, which is almost extinct.”)

KATHARINE HEPBURN appreciated Grant’s humor offscreen as well as on: “Cary was a lovely, very generous actor. A good comedian. And so funny. He had a wonderful laugh. When you looked at that face of his, it was full of a wonderful kind of laughter in the back of his eyes. Of course, he was also very serious.” Howard Hawks was fully aware of Grant’s wider range, as he told PETER BOGDANOVICH. “Cary is a great comedian and a great dramatic actor. He can do anything.”

When LOUIS JOURDAN first saw Cary Grant on the screen in Bringing Up Baby, he found him irresistible: “I discovered this extraordinary presence. I was in awe of this persona on the screen – the look, the walk. But mainly it was his extraordinary, innate sense of the absurd. He was a master of the absurd, a pioneer before the theater of the absurd arrived. The Cary Grant I fell in love with on the screen hadn’t yet discovered he was Cary Grant. He was absolutely in the raw. All those mannerisms – everything that has been imitated for forty years – he didn’t know yet.

“Pauline Kael, the critic, made me see what makes Cary unique. At the same second that he is delightful and charming and irresistible, there is also the threat he could have a black side. He is constantly in conflict. Behind the construction of his character is his working-class background. That’s what makes him interesting. That’s what makes him liked by the public. He’s close to them. He’s not an aristocrat He’s not a bourgeois. He’s a man of his people. He is a man of the street pretending to be Cary Grant!”

Grant confided to JACK HALEY, JR. the origins of one of Bringing Up Baby’s funniest sequences: “It was the scene in which Cary steps on the tail of Katharine Hepburn’s dress and tears out the rear panel. He based it on a real-life happening. He went to the Roxy Theater in New York. Sitting next to him were the head of the Metropolitan Museum and his wife. At some point he gets up to go to the men’s room and returns. A little while later the woman gets up and crosses in front of him. They’re right at the edge of the balcony, he starts to stand, and he sees that his fly is open. So he zips his fly shut and catches her frock in it. They had to lock step to the manager’s office to get pliers to unzip his fly from the dress. He told Howard Hawks the story, and Hawks used it. He couldn’t use the fly joke, but he used the lockstep.”

Hawks liked to tell another story. “It may be apocryphal,” explains PETER BOGDANOVICH, “but Cary never refuted it. There’s a scene where Cary’s supposed to get angry, and Howard said, ‘That’s pretty dull. You get angry like Joe Doakes down the block. I know a guy, when he gets angry, he kind of whinnies like a horse. Why don’t you do that?’ So Cary went like this … [makes whinnying sound]. And then that became a part of his persona. Now, you could say that Hawks could have given that direction to anybody. But it wouldn’t necessarily have worked. It wouldn’t have worked with Bogart or Cooper or Gable. It worked with Cary Grant. Perhaps Hawks was inspired by the qualities Cary brought to the scene and knew Cary could make it work.”

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13 Responses to The Books: “Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best” (Nancy Nelson)

  1. Mary Eman says:

    Wow! Someone else loves this book. If you’re a Cary Grant fan, this is a must have.

  2. jennchez says:

    love love love this book

  3. brendan says:

    total heaven.

    i just watched ‘to catch a thief’ the other night, which isn’t so hot in my humble opinion, but as usual cary grant is out of freakin’ control.

    he has a scene where he has swum out to a raft to talk to a little frenchie he knows…grace kelly swims out to meet them and see what the fuss is all about.

    he is caught in the middle of a catfight and his response is HILARIOUS. he looks up at the sky, he almost swallows water, he guffaws, his eyes dart back and forth, it is a master class.

  4. red says:

    Mary, Jenn – ahhhh, it is so nice to meet folks who also love this book. A goldmine, right?

    I love the detail in the excerpt I posted about Grant teaching Hepburn about grabbing onto his wrist in the brontosaurus fall … and how she picked it up quickly. So neat!

  5. brendan says:

    i love that about actors, good ones anyways…(speaking of hepburn and the wrist grab)…they are always ready to absorb expertise, they have to be able to take it in and reproduce it.

    i love that.

  6. red says:

    Right, that she was like: “Oh, grab the wrists, is it? Well all righty then …” So that last crazy stunt just makes me smile because you can see Hepburn making sure she goes for his wrists … She was such a jock.

  7. red says:

    Bren – I went and saw To Catch a Thief at the Film Forum and it was a ton of fun seeing it on a big screen. It changed my experience of the film in a way – to see it BIG – those panoramas, the technicolor, the wide vistas, all that.

    I do love the fireworks scene, which is so cheesy – but she smoulders in it … and I also love how befuddled and turned on he looks after she kisses him for the first time.

    And yes, I totally know the scene you mean with the Frenchie out by the raft! Ha!!

  8. brendan says:

    don’t get me wrong, it is still ‘to catch a thief’ but i’ve watched ‘north by northwest’ a billion times and i don’t think i need to see ‘t.c.a.t’ that many times.

    she is amazing, actually. sexy to a crazy degree. i’d love to see it on the big screen.

    did you see ‘vertigo’ when they re-released it? holy mackerel.

  9. red says:

    Yeah, To catch a Thief really seemed like a different movie to me, you know? Like when I saw High Noon on the big screen. It just POPPED. It’s great whereever you see it – but seeing it on the big screen was a whole different thing.

  10. DBW says:

    Just wanted to say I have always loved Grant in the scene Brendan mentions. The little catfight, and Grant’s reaction to it, are priceless. Kelly and Grant, in general, almost give me sexual sensory overload. Has there ever been two more attractive people on the screen at the same time?

  11. dorkafork says:

    Has there ever been two more attractive people on the screen at the same time?

    The only pairing I can think of that compares is… Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade.

  12. The Books: “Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best” (Nancy Nelson)

    Next book on my “entertainment biography” shelf: Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best, by Nancy Nelson I can imagine that this is pretty much a book only for hardcore fans….

  13. Giga Leach says:

    “Evenings With Cary Grant” It took a very smart Amazon employee a while to get a hard cover edition of this book for me. It is a priceless possession in my home library. Every time I open this book, my good energy travels to Barbara Harris Grant. Cary Grant, the most important and brilliant thespian in the history of our cinema had chosen well in the last years of his life. He was such a noble person, he deserved the best from life. Not until he met The Love Of His Life -Barbara was he a fulfilled man. I truly worry about Barbara, because she is all alone and people are not always true and kind to her. Preserving a legacy of Cary Grant magnificence is not an easy task for her, I am sure.

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